One man’s tragically doomed quest to get off Best Buy’s spam email list

Dealing with spam offers from retailers is one of the more annoying components of managing email these days but for the most part you can make them go away by unsubscribing to them. Note how we said, “For the most part.” Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin found himself on Best Buy’s official email list and he did the sensible thing most people do and tried to unsubscribe. It didn’t work. Then he tried complaining directly to Best Buy, whose representatives promised to remove him from the list. That also didn’t work. As a result, his inbox still looked like this after multiple complaints:

Eventually, Brodkin decided to tell Best Buy that he planned to write a story about their remarkable inability to stop spamming him and the spamming magically stopped. The company told him that being continually spammed despite unsubscribing was an “isolated incident” that was somehow unsolvable until it realized he was a professional journalist.